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BBC pre-Paris spin: What is Climate Change?

The BBC has a new article asking ‘What is Climate Change?’ There is much to criticise, although ‘sceptics’ do at least get a mention in regard to ‘the pause’, which is briefly mentioned in a paragraph far down the article. Have a look and post your thoughts below.

Heading the article there is a video about COP 21 which consists of a 1 minute pep-talk on how the UN Green blob intends to disrupt the world’s economies.

Note the BBC signature – black smoke being emitted from the water cooling towers.

In their article, the BBC tell us that:

Solar energy radiating back out to space from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases and re-emitted in all directions. The energy that radiates back down to the planet heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface.

However, there is no explanation of how a colder, higher region of the atmosphere heats a warmer lower region of it or the surface with a radiative flux, in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Nor is there any explanation of how this ‘back radiation’ heats the ocean, when physics tells us that longwave radiation can’t penetrate the surface to any depth beyond a few nanometres – much less than the thickness of a human hair. Nor is there any mention of the fact that the tropical tropospheric hot-spot that must develop in order for their theory to work has not been observed. Indeed, the mid troposphere has warmed less than the surface, as John Christy’s data showing the abject failure of the models demonstrates.

The BBC go on to tell us that:

Scientists believe we are adding to the natural greenhouse effect with gases released from industry and agriculture (known as emissions), trapping more energy and increasing the temperature. This is commonly referred to as global warming or climate change.

But they don’t tell us which scientists are prepared to make such an unscientific statement – in fact there are no citation references to any science anywhere in the article. The statement implicitly excludes any natural effects changing the climate.

The BBC then shoot their own argument in the foot by telling us that:

The most important of these greenhouse gases in terms of its contribution to warming is water vapour, but concentrations show little change and it persists in the atmosphere for only a few days.

The modellers are unable to concoct any significant warming without a water vapour feedback, so since “water vapour … concentrations show little change”, we can disregard COP 21 as an expensive irrelevance attempting to overhype a non-problem.

There are plenty of other things in this article which can be pulled apart, such as their allusion to ‘tipping points’, so please add your criticisms below and I’ll hack them into a complaint to the BBC for propagandising the population which pays for their biased output.

It shows only the latest version of the NASA fudged data and this needs pointing out with a graph of what it looked like before they cooled the past.

I agree out the smoke stack cooling towers.

They need a graph displaying the temperature cycles over geological periods if they want to demonstrate the current rise is unprecedented.The graph should have CO2 overlaid showing that the causal relationship may be reversed.

‘The modellers are unable to concoct any significant warming without a water vapour feedback, so since “water vapour … concentrations show little change”, we can disregard COP 21 as an expensive irrelevance attempting to overhype a non-problem.’

That’s exactly it, the massive predominance of water vapour over CO2 (about 20:1) has been airbrushed out of the picture in BBC and IPCC-world.

Even a 50% increase in CO2 would only be a small increase in so-called greenhouse gases overall i.e. INCLUDING water vapour. And that’s assuming the CO2 doesn’t replace some water vapour, which it might do.

Watching the climate extremists at the BBC and their car crash with climate is like watching those old movies with the spiked rooms that start pressing in. But really really slowly.

We are at the stage where some of the idiots who went in that room have realised the walls are closing in. Others have either left or are trying the handle to try to get out. But the BBC is still cockey as ever running around like a demented chicken oblivious to the fact the scientific evidence is steadily closing in on their eco-non-science.

So, what really intrigues me, is not the fact that science will sooner or later close in on them, but whether they have the sense to get out before the door jams shut (if it hasn’t already) and what it will be like to see once conceited institutions proclaiming their omnipotence over the climate … being mangled by their own stupid choice to ignore the science.

Yes its a while since any ‘so called reputable source’ like the BBC put out the colder heating hotter gross mistake.
Usually these days its the more plausible CO2 causing more radiative insulation explanation that gets aired.

However if we even accept the less idiotic elements of IPCC science the result is nothing to worry about!

Assumption one

There is a radiative imbalance of 0.58W/m2 causing the Earth to heat up

The Earth, they say in the recent past ‘has been heating up because more energy arrives on average than leaves and CO2 is the principle cause

This heating effect can be transmitted to deep ocean water (and even hide there) according to Kevin Trenberth

Then do a calculation as follows with assumptions stated above.

Water covers 71% of planet surface area so a calculation for water might be a rough guide to overall effect.
Water is reasonably mixable given the calculated long time obtained.
Time chosen is length of time to raise mass of water by one Kelvin

So lets see how much heat is required to heat up the Oceans by one degree!

Accepting for the sake of the calculation the excess heat imbalance per square metre per second that worries the IPCC.

Abstract
Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000–2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% as compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findings show that stratospheric water vapor is an important driver of decadal global surface climate change.

So without an increase in atmospheric water vapour tracking or even exceeding the increase in atmospheric CO2, the high sensitivity water vapour feedback driven anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is dead in the water.

TB
Solar energy radiating back out to space from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases and re-emitted in all directions. The energy that radiates back down to the planet heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface.
However, there is no explanation of how a colder, higher region of the atmosphere heats a warmer lower region of it or the surface with a radiative flux, in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Nor is there any explanation of how this ‘back radiation’ heats the ocean, when physics tells us that longwave radiation can’t penetrate the surface to any depth beyond a few nanometres – much less than the thickness of a human hair
——————-
Oh dear so you have now joined the skydragons.

you at 37°C sitting in a room in a vacuum at -273°C will cool by radiation. There is no radiation from the walls hitting you.

you at 37°C sitting in a room in a vacuum at -273°C next to a ice block at 0°C will cool by radiation. There is no radiation from the walls hitting you. BUT there is radiation from the block hitting you. You will not get warmer but you will cool less quickly.

[Reply] Yes, but this is not the argument used by the BBC, which is the one I was addressing. So I haven’t “joined the skydragons”. Note also that we are not “sitting in a vacuum”, though BBC science editors may be sitting in a vacuum of common sense. 🙂 – TB

This fact is used by room temperature thermal imaging cameras. a small IR sensor pixel at room temperature with IR from a room temp object focussed on it receives as much heat as it radiates and therefore is at a certain temperature (the object will be effectively IR invisible), focus IR from any object different to room temp on it and you change the energy balance and that pixel heats (object above RT energy balance is positive) or cools (object below RT – note it is not being cooled by the object it is simply receiving less IR and therefore energy but initially is still radiating at RT – energy balance is negative). The sensor is always radiating energy to its surroundings at RT. The limiting temperature is set by the noise of the system very low temperature objects radiate little IR so -50°C is usually a limiting low temperature measurement for a room temperature microbolometer. However the same camera may read temps from objects as hot as 1000°C

If water were totally still then the top layer molecules will be heated by IR. Water is not still so some of the top layer molecules become middle layer molecules and the water warms.
If the water is still then the top layer molecules will warm due to IR. The next layer down molecules will now receive more down-welling heat by conduction from the top layer molecules and will warm etc. IR does warm water.

The mean free path of IR at STP is minute (67nm). and the IR transfers energy to other molecules very quickly. In all directions. If these upward IR rays were able to escape the earth from these room temp molecules then they would be radiating energy away from the earth at a rate equivalent to a body at room temperature. But the IR energy has to go through many transfers between CO2 and Air molecules until at the “top of atmosphere” the MFP allows the IR to escape. The temperature at this point is low. So the energy escaping to space is as if it were emitted from a body at the surrounding low temp. The higher the CO2 in the atmosphere the lower the rate of cooling of the earth. H2O is not present at high altitudes.

From Roy spencer:
1) there are 26,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules in 1 cubic meter of air at sea level.
2) at room temperature, each molecule is traveling at a very high speed, averaging 1,000 mph for heavier molecules like nitrogen, over 3,000 mph for the lightest molecule, hydrogen, etc.
3) the average distance a molecule travels before hitting another molecule (called the “mean free path”) is only 0.000067 of a millimetre

The British Broadcasting Corporation uses the American NASA Gistemp data, whilst the IPCC uses the British HADCRUT4 figures. Even then, the BBC does not try to show a correspondence between rises in GHG levels and rising temperature over the temperature data period from 1880.
I will help the BBC out. The major GHG is CO2, for which there is quite good data since 1959. Before that the increases were low and there is data from ice cores, particularly from Law Dome Antarctica. Also CO2 is meant to have be a lagged impact on warming. I looked at alleged decadal rises in temperature from CO2 with an assumed 3 C of climate sensitivity, against the actual decadal changes in temperature anomalies from HADCRUT4.

If you look at the last 3 decades there is a very good fit. But there are issues.
1. For the 13 preceding decades of the 1850s to the 1970s there is no fit at all.
2. The year 2000 was abnormally cool, making it appear 2000-2009 was warming.
3. From 2010 to 2014 the rise in temperature should be 0.2 C, but the series fell by about 0.05 C.
4. The warming in the pipeline at the end of 2014 is now around 0.23 C.
4. CO2 is not the only Greenhouse gas. The BBC says it accounts for 57% total GHG rise. Just looking at the last 3 decades, that would reduce climate sensitivity down to 1.7 C. But over a longer period the sensitivity is much lower.

Oldbrew said “And that’s assuming the CO2 doesn’t replace some water vapour, which it might do.”
Maybe a good point.
I saw a graph of water vapour and it showed a steady decline for the whole period of measurements. Don’ know if I can find it. But decline in wv and increase in co2 may cancel out, hence pause ?

JM: The best data I have on WV shows a rise in near surface WV and a decline in the mid-upper atmosphere from 2000-2012. Then the dataset got ‘updated’, which mangled everything. Maybe they didn’t like the way it was going…

Just so. Therefore the atmosphere should warm first. Therefore lack of said warming indicates that the models which show warming (97% of them) are, at worst wrong and at best incomplete – empirically. And anyone claiming the extra heat is in the oceans needs to explain how it got there without anyone noticing that it heated air first. Yet the policies being enacted and/or proposed – all of which are economically, and therefore socially, harmful – are being informed by these known to be wrong models. How long do you think this can continue before enough people notice that it becomes politically untenable?

The IPCC advocates advance contradictory positions.
For maximum atmospheric heating very little heat must be absorbed by the Oceans.
The Suns radiation and atmospheric back radiation can be easily absorbed in the deep Oceans (and even hide there) according to Kevin Trenberth
But the IR fraction (over 50%) cannot penetrate further than a few millimeters as TB says.
In any event the minimum amount of energy required to increase the temperature of the Oceans by one degree is colossal!
Given perfect absorption it would take the best part of a millenium to happen as my calculation above shows.

Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany resurrected the “International Tribunal of Climate Justice” and inserted it into the text they are preparing for nations to agree to at the big UN summit in Paris in December.

The draft text will allow developing nations to sit in judgment over the U.S. and its allies, but not subject those nations to the tribunal’s jurisdiction themselves.

From the October 20th UN draft text (full text available at CFACT.org):

“[An International Tribunal of Climate Justice as][A] [compliance mechanism] is hereby established to address cases of non-compliance of the commitments of developed country Parties on mitigation, adaptation, [provision of] finance, technology development and transfer [and][,] capacity-building[,] and transparency of action and support, including through the development of an indicative list of consequences, taking into account the cause, type, degree and frequency of non-compliance.”

Over 130 developing nations led by South Africa and instigated by China and India are insisting that they will not sign a climate agreement in Paris unless it contains massive redistribution of wealth from developed to poor nations. Now they want the power to haul the U.S. and its allies before a UN Star Chamber to enforce compliance.

This is not the first time that a climate court has appeared in a UN COP 21 Logoclimate text. In 2011 a nearly identical provision crept into the text at the UN’s climate summit in Durban. The provision was stripped from the text after CFACT’s Climate Depot blew the whistle and Marc Morano’s exclusive was picked up by the media. This time they substitute the word “tribunal” for “court” and insist that the body will be “non-judicial.”

The slight edit to the terminology offers little comfort.

If the climate tribunal becomes the focus of public scrutiny, watch for the negotiators to pull a switch behind closed doors and try and accomplish the same thing by re-branding it an enforcement “mechanism.”

From oldbrew::> ” We’ll have darker skin, and be taller and thinner due to global warming”. (OMG I’m already there.) Really, in the year that has focused attention on obesity, that should not be so bad.

But seriously, climate change has been around for aeons, only its ‘sudden’ manifestation takes kyears, or centuries, to occur from one change to another, but change it did. The archaeologist Claude Schaeffer found plenty of evidence of that. History can also be a great teacher, better than math modeling.

Clive Best did a post on atmospheric water vapour and the graphs there show a reduction in WV that coincide quit well with the pause. The percentage reduction in WV would indeed seem to have been sufficient to cancel the percentage increase in co2. Hence the pause.http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=4517

JM: The percentage reduction in WV would indeed seem to have been sufficient to cancel the percentage increase in co2. Hence the pause.

I don’t think it’s that simple. Sure, a minor downward trend in WV is going to be a negative feeedback to warming. Especially as the downward trend is in the upper troposphere. But the issue is not so much the low energy density atmosphere, it’s the oceans. Around six years ago, the ARGO data showed a ‘pause’ in ocean heat content from 2003-2008. Now the data has been ‘adjusted’ and shows a steady upward trend from 2003, consistent with a thermal expansion of the oceans which is itself consistent with the outlier tide guages the satellite altimetry was calibrated to.

However

Most tide gauges show no such rise. Ocean heat content is probably as flat as it was when Josh Willis told the truth about it (before he was forced to recant), and since OLR has been increasing, the real situation is likely to be that energy is leaving the planet, not accumulating. Not by much, but a slightly negative energy balance. Excess energy built up in the oceans 1934-2003 is still keeping the surface warm – for now.

How quickly the cooling will deepen isn’t certain, we’re still at the top of the curve. My rough model forecasts around a 0.2 to 0.3C decline in global temp by 2050. It might get colder faster in northern temperate latitudes though, especially Europe if the gulf stream dips southwards, and in the interiors of the big continents.

Far from selling my coat I am planning on having triple glazing put in. Any extra ocean heat likely came from the crust and lower, there being no mechanism to transfer heat from atmosphere to ocean. Since water vapour is substantially the greater greenhouse gas than co2 it would not take much reduction in water vapour to cancel even the 100ppm increase in co2 that we’ve seen. And although it is obviously difficult to produce an average for WV reduction over different heights it would seem on balance that there has been enough to cancel out the increase in co2. I don’t doubt there are many other factors to climate,weather and temperatures, and that the long term prognosis is a slide into a glaciation, but as far as the eyeblink of the pause goes, reduced water vapour may be that simple reason.

This invalidates all the climate models since they are based on a religious belief that if co2 climbs the WV will as well, yet the reality is that WV has fallen. Long-term background forcing, probably obliquity, means that although we may see some further warming one day, eventually the climate will be forced to correct itself to somewhere near where the background driver is taking us. Co2 has no long term significant impact, and has had no impact for getting on towards 19 years. If the pause can drag itself out to 2022 then solar cycle 25 should finish the co2 camp followers.

Looking at Clive’s 2 yr old post suggests the numbers to explain the pause are there. I may be wrong as WV on its own is no doubt horribly complicated and difficult to measure, but on the face of it…

All the windows in my house are single glazed, but recently I had the backdoor replaced with a triple glazed version. A couple of weeks ago I woke up to find condensation on the inside of the single glazed window a very common occurrence, but to my horror I thought my brand new triple glazed back door window had sprung a leak as it also had condensation on it, but I found it was on the outside of the window, something I hadn’t seen before. We won’t mention the catflap in the door which must negate much of the benefits of the triple glazed door, though not all, I am sure it has helped.

Temporary warming is driven by water vapour not co2 and co2 does not drive water vapour so any model based on co2 will fail. But this raises an even more difficult question, what drives water vapour ? The sun ?

J Martin says: “Clive Best did a post on atmospheric water vapour and the graphs there show a reduction in WV that coincide quit well with the pause.”

See also Solomon et al.

Abstract
Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000–2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% as compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findings show that stratospheric water vapor is an important driver of decadal global surface climate change.

Lomborg: ‘He writes the planned expansion of green energies by the year 2040 will cost 2.3 trillion dollars and result in only in a mere 0.0175 °C less temperature rise by the end of the century (using the climate forcing figures provided by the climate models).’